Agnes Denes: Wheatfield -A Confrontation and an Introduction to Food Justice

"I was invited to do a public sculpture and decided we had enough public sculptures, enough men sitting on horses. I decided to plant a wheat field instead." Generally opposed to and unsatisfied with what was considered sufficient public art at the time, Agnes Denes undertook the effort to turn the Battery Park landfill into a mural of sorts for what some may consider the loss of accessibility to nutritious food in urban areas, both visually and as a consumable. The Wheatfield can be thought of as an appeal to nostalgia for the United States' origins as an agrarian society and the historical pitfalls of that understanding, i.e., a history of food as a symbol of power and how the people indentured to produce food for sale and consumption in the US often failed to reap the benefits of their labor. Denes asks for patience in creating a sanctuary to retreat into fatigue and celebration; the endured labor is the art more so than the spectacle of a fully grown wheatfield. Denes spent an insurmountable amount of time meticulously caring for two out of the four allocated acres given to her by the Public Art Fund, a non-profit organization based in New York centered around the installation of public project sites as a benefit of expanding the art world outside of the confines of an institutional setting. What is a public art installation in service of? I think people are wary of performative gestures associated with public art, especially in reference to statue work. There's an understanding of what obligation public art has to give back to or intensely visually change its community. Land art, more so than other mediums, has the means to create a dramatic visual shift whilst also not being entirely rooted in permanence, that a gradual breakdown of the finished work is a vital aspect. That you can create something while holding in mind that the community this work inhabits should have the authority to exercise what its future looks like. In looking at Denes' wheatfield, it becomes difficult to understand what the finished work is. Is it a photograph of the matured wheat, or the labor that Denes endeavors, or is it the seed of the wheat that was donated, or the hay that was manufactured? Or is it all of it at once?

Denes brings into question how deeply we take for granted both the time given away in service of feeding others and how the spaces we inhabit are utilized to their fullest extent. The land on which the wheatfield was planted was valued at 4.5 billion dollars by the project's end. In the modern day, we're so interested in maximizing production, constantly questioning how we can be a percentage more efficient. In a sense, this mindset is entirely counterproductive to being productive by any means, especially when it comes to artistic practice. We have to try things that are difficult, but we have to focus on the maintenance of our practice first and foremost. Thinking about farming as resistance and its origins as a means of protest is related especially to marginalized communities' ability to self-sustain in the face of entities that would seek to render them invisible through the denial of resources, including access to healthy food. Community organizing around farming played a key role in the US civil rights movement surrounding people of color. Constructing culture through the experimentation involved in starting your own garden and sharing meals is a radical form of self-determination. Georgia Gilmore was a founding member of the Club from Nowhere and ran an impromptu restaurant out of her Montgomery, Alabama home throughout the 1950s, acting as a safe space for Black Americans largely segregated from the greater food service industry of the South to find both nutritious meals and a space to plan community organizing efforts. The Club from Nowhere would later grow into a cooperative effort among women to sell pastries and other baked goods as a means of providing funding to protest efforts and sustaining the Montgomery bus boycott. The Freedom Farm Cooperative was born in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and had its original ideals based on rejecting the sharecropping system of the Jim Crow era in favor of having the ability to till your own lands and share the produce among the workforce. Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist and farmer, envisioned this cooperative as a means of supporting Black families' abilities to willfully reject a government that at the time was actively seeking to oppress them in part through federal programs intended to keep poor black people from elevating their class status. The cooperative wasn't solely occupied in the production of food but was uniquely interested in educating Black Americans so that they might have the opportunity to achieve greater mobility beyond the menial labor of which agricultural business in the South primarily consisted. In having the ability to grow your own food, you also gained the ability to create a voice of opposition for yourself without having to live in fear of losing your job and your access to land. What initially began on 40 acres of land gradually grew to 600 with the inclusion of cash crops like cotton to sell to sustain the farm and a labor program for which impoverished families could trade time working for a share of the produce.

Such a huge part of conceptualizing Denes's efforts in Wheatfield - A Confrontation is understanding how important ownership of land is to the history of the United States and your ability to achieve a semblance of the "American dream," of which New York City is seemingly symbolic of.